Osman Arabi - "Beast Mutation Rituals"

Artist: Osman Arabi
Album: Beast Mutation Rituals
Year: 2011
Label: Kalpamantra
Genre: Dark / Ritual Ambient, Experimental
Website: http://kalpamantra.bandcamp.com
this album on discogs: here

 

 



 

Basics:
"Beast Mutation Rituals" is the new release from the fairly prolific Osman Arabi (maybe you know him from his other projects 20.sv, Seeker, Shamanic Death Trance, etc.). This is a single 25 minute ritual of extremely dense, crushing, darkly arcane soundscapes.

Good stuff:
+ This is an INTENSE release. "Beast Mutation Rituals" pummels you with primordial ferocity from start to finish. It reaches it's feral, blackened tendrils down into the the twisting corridors of your subconscious; disassembling every bit of you quark by quark, and, by some ancient design, it reconfigures this slop of minutiae into something infinitely strengthened and more horrible. All this while repetitively beating your higher consciousness into oblivion.  The intensity comes from the quite dense mix; there are many elements at play at all times, with little downtime. There is an ever-present bed of thick, black, droning ambience, and over top of this foundation is a continuously evolving mixture of sparse, ritualistic drumming; mutilated samples; haunting pads; and heaps of bizarre, shifting dissonance. You are kind of hearing the same type of stuff throughout the entire 25 minutes, however, everything is consistently moving, pulsating, and changing with hypnotic fervor, so it never feels repetitive or boring. The mix is so thick, and so much happening within that it is impossible to actively follow it all; it's best to just relax, close yourself off from the world and let your subconscious receive and be dismantled by it. I wouldn't say that this is expertly programmed or even necessarily terribly thought out or coherent; instead the beauty of this is that Arabi has channeled pure, unrefined, feral chaos (and I mean this in a sincere fashion, not just in the sense of someone making a cacophony of random pointless noises and squelches which is also "chaos"), and upon listening, one can actively feel oneself descend into it with no protective measures.

Bad stuff:
- Mix could be cleaner and the ritual drumming stronger and more powerful.

Summary:
This is certainly on the more experimental and interesting side of the dark ambient spectrum. I would definitely recommend this to fans of Aural Hypnox and the like, and those into more ambient PE and death industrial like Steel Hook Prostheses and Megaptera. The length is seemingly a bit short for a release, but I find that 25 minutes of this is the perfect duration. This is a free digital release, so don't pass it up.

Overall Rating: 8/10